


Duress

by gamb



Category: Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)
Genre: Flash Fic, Gen, In the sense that this is a dozen flash fics stapled together, Post-Eldraine, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25815742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamb/pseuds/gamb
Summary: Garruk has one more planeswalker to kill if he's to betrulyfree.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	Duress

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in eight hours with the Hellblade soundtrack put on repeat, almost all of it in one sitting that ended around 3:30 in the morning.
> 
> Sometimes you get an image in your head and it _has to come out_ , even though you're supposed to be doing other things.

**i.**  
Garruk makes sure the twins are safe, first of all. It isn’t hard to find them; they have no experience planeswalking, and their trail arcs and blazes through the Blind Eternities like a perpetual lightning strike, nearly blinding. They haven’t gone much past their initial landing spot--an alley that reeks of rotting food scraps and moldering cloth. He finds them in minutes and tells them what they are while he shepherds them somewhere safer, where the air is nearly free of city miasma, and stashes them in the quietest inn he can find.

“You here for the games, are you?” the barkeeper asks, looking Garruk up and down.

“No,” Garruk intones. He nods towards the twins. “They are. I don’t have any money now, but you keep them happy and I’ll make it worth your while.”

The barkeeper’s smile suggests he understands _make it worth your while_ to mean _leave you with all limbs intact._

They get a corner room with windows overlooking the city. It is likely the best room in the inn, and Garruk adds a tally to the barman’s favor. He doesn’t care for the view--cities always look like cities, wherever they are--but the twins run to the windows and lean out to watch the sun set behind the foreign skyline.

He gives them a few minutes before he pulls Will aside.

“I need to go. Explain to your sister. She won’t understand.”

“I--I don’t understand,” Will stammers. “You’re not going after Oko, are you? You can’t, not alone.”

“No. Not Oko,” Garruk says. Someone else. Someone he’s been hunting for a long, long time. “I’ll be back in a few days.”

“Garruk, wait, we just got here--”

The sucking wind of the Blind Eternities cuts off Will’s complaint.

**ii.  
**Garruk doesn’t remember the first planeswalker he killed. He only remembers that it wasn’t _her,_ and the knowledge that she still lived had driven him forward even when the blood in his veins burned beyond bearing. She would not escape him; he refused to let it be so.

It’s strange, the way he misses the burning. Sometimes corruption feels like absolution. Salvation feels like an obligation.

He has had no goal but her death for...a time. A stolen time he has no way of reckoning. He had looked at his face in the mirror and tried to gauge how much older he was than he had been. Years older, at least. Or perhaps time had merely worn hard on him. It doesn’t matter--she stole something irreplaceable either way.

He has new goals to pursue. New commitments _._ But he cannot attend them until this last thing is done.

He will not truly be free until Liliana Vess is dead.

**iii.  
**Her old haunts are empty, and have been for some time. The clothes in her closets are dusty and moth-eaten and so long unused they have no trace of her scent on them; nevertheless, he throws them on the floor and pisses on them. He smashes the windows and throws her books out onto the ground, hacks randomly at the furniture.

It makes him feel a little better, but not enough.

The villagers near her Innistradi mansion claim she has not been seen for over a year, not since the business with Avacyn and the octopus in the sky. He doesn’t ask what that means.

There’s no one to ask near the cave on Grixis, but the state of it suggests it’s been abandoned even longer than the Innistradi house. Eyeless bat-like creatures infest every crevice.

The Kinshala house has half-collapsed under the weight of creeping vines, and passersby complain to him about how this historical house in the heart of the city has been allowed to fall into disrepair.

The demons are dead, every one.

The last place he checks, the temple on Shandalar, has been demolished completely. He shifts the stones and smells sulfur and saltpeter. The destruction was intentional, but he cannot say who did it. Black powder doesn’t seem like her style.

Frustration raises the hair at the back of his neck. Why hadn’t he come sooner? He’d hunted relentlessly to find the places where she hid, but he’d somehow never managed to catch her in her lair. Planning had been...difficult. There had been entire months he didn’t sleep; his reality had become a waking dream, ground pulsing, trees dripping their leaves onto the ground, clouds falling out of the sky to try to smother him. Sometimes he could only remember the way her lips curved into a sneer as she cursed him, everything else--past, present, and future--lost beneath its dark surface. On the worst days, he could not even say his name.

Now that he’s remembered everything, she’s gone.

**iv.  
**He remembers the second planeswalker he killed.

He can’t recall what impulse led him to follow the other planeswalker’s trail. She had a smell of death about her, and it must have reminded him enough of the other _her_ that he had turned to stalk her when he caught her scent. The other planeswalker led him to an island covered in trees whose trunks and branches swooped and curved and connected in loops, each one so massive that a dozen men could walk abreast on them and saplings grew on the highest branches. His feet sunk into the bark as he approached, his very presence causing rot.

For a moment, he remembers thinking the other planeswalker _was_ Vess--she was pale-skinned and black-haired and clad in dark clothing and his hands had tightened on the shaft of his axe in excitement. But then the girl--for it was a girl, lanky in adolescence but still a girl--had turned around and he had seen her face. The cheeks were too round, the eyes too narrow and dark, to be Vess.

Her dark eyes widened at the sight of him, and she babbled out a string of nonsense apologies and pleas. He chased when she ran, but the twisting branches, large as they were, offered few places for her to hide. The outcome of the hunt was never in doubt.

He cleaved her in two, shoulder to hip, and screamed and swore and damned her soul because it wasn’t the one he wanted.

**v.  
**He likes Jace Beleren. There’s something heartening about a creature that is bold despite weakness, that stands puffed and hissing in front of a much larger predator. It’s delightful, even when _you_ are the larger predator. _Especially_ when you are the larger predator. A dog that growls at wolves is better than one that grovels, though both dogs are dead all the same.

He also likes Jace Beleren because Jace Beleren is easy to find. Jace Beleren, despite his illusions, despite his paranoia, never got a knack for hiding. It’s hard to hide when you can’t keep out of other people’s business, and Jace Beleren has made a hobby out of getting into the middle of everything.

Despite this, Garruk cannot find him.

Beleren never wanders far from Ravnica, but what trail Garruk can find is so old as to be almost useless. Well-trod, to last this long, but unused for some time. A triangle path, between Ravnica and two worlds Garruk doesn’t know. Garruk cannot catch his scent on Ravnica, nor on the dusty, ruined second world.

The third, at first, seems hopeless too. He can’t taste Beleren on the wind, and that would’ve been the end of it, if not for an oddity. _Many_ planeswalkers have been here, of late. They’ve trampled a trail that still lingers in the Eternities, if only barely. 

When he gets close, he gets a whiff of melting ice and just-ended rain, camouflaged by the other smells but still discernible. Garruk smiles and inhales deeply.

**vi.  
**Garruk was never certain which of his kills alerted Jace Beleren to his rampage. Someone in the first dozen or so must have been an acquaintance of Beleren’s, and so Beleren had started investigating and discovered what Garruk had become. It’s hard to imagine Beleren caring for the red-eyed madwoman dressed in lizard skins who had foolishly attempted to poison Garruk to save her own life, or the laughing goblin who had thought himself safe high in the thin upper branches of a tree, but perhaps the dark artificer had been Beleren’s friend, or the vedalken father who bent his head willingly on the condition that Garruk spare his children.

(He didn’t spare them. The children were not planeswalkers, but proximity to their father had permeated their bones with the smell of the Eternities, and he could not bear their presence.)

It doesn’t matter. Garruk _does_ know which of his kills were Beleren’s agents. He wonders, sometimes, what Beleren said to get them to agree to the job. Perhaps he said nothing and used his mind magics instead.

There had been the disfigured man. Pulling the mask off of the decapitated head had been a shock, even to one as mad as Garruk. There had been the shaman wearing a minotaur’s head and horns. There had been the plant woman, a dryad or some such thing, and the lady knight, and the merwoman covered in burn scars, the electromancer and the ice mage, the loxodon whose thick neck had required two swings to cut through.

He realizes that there had been a lot of them, now that he’s lucid enough to count.

He wonders whether Beleren feels guilty about ordering them all to their deaths.

 **vii.  
**Garruk finds Beleren in a small, open-air plaza ringed with trees on the third world. Beleren sits on a bench facing a white-stone statue of a man that dominates the center of the plaza. He’s gazing at it, arms crossed and slouching.

“Beleren,” Garruk calls.

To his credit, Beleren doesn’t startle. He closes his eyes and makes an expression that might be disgust or might be fatigue before rubbing at his forehead. He doesn’t move from the bench when Garruk comes to stand in front of the statue, but Garruk narrows his eyes and studies the other man’s form.

The sound of Beleren’s breathing is slightly out of sync with the movement of his chest. Beleren has spun an illusion. Garruk smiles. Always predictable.

“You know why I’m here, Beleren,” Garruk says.

Beleren--the illusion of Beleren--doesn’t even look at him. Instead, he casts his gaze to the side and grips the edge of the bench and sighs. “She’s dead, Garruk. I watched her body burn myself.”

“Don’t lie.”

“Her ashes are floating in a swamp on Dominaria,” Beleren says curtly. He stares, insolent. “I’d take you to see them, but...ashes. Even if you could somehow sift them out of the water, I’m not sure how you’d tell whose they were.”

The possibility that Vess could have died already had not occurred to Garruk until that moment. He shifts uneasily on his feet.

“It’s hard to take the word of a man who won’t speak to my face,” he says.

The illusion-Beleren flickers and falls apart...to reveal another Beleren, sitting not half an inch from where the illusion had been. Garruk offers a half-smile. A clever gambit. Beleren has learned from their previous encounters.

“She is dead,” Beleren repeats, unblinking. “Now go away.”

Garruk leans against his axe, feeling off-balance. 

What does it mean to him that Liliana Vess is already dead? 

It should mean nothing. It should mean only that his quest is finished unexpectedly early. 

But his voice comes out rough, thick, when he asks: 

“How?”

**viii.  
**Food used to rot on the way to his mouth. He became used to eating fruit fuzzy with mold, meat heavy with maggots, water viscous with slime. Food that tastes the way food is supposed to taste is still a revelation, and he stuffs his mouth eagerly, gluttonously.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Will asks, eating his own dinner with the fastidious manners of a royal.

Rowan, freed from her stepmother’s gaze, has manners closer to Garruk than to Will. “ _What_ were you looking for?” comes out garbled, accompanied by a dribble of broth down her chin.

Garruk has to chew for some time before his mouth is clear enough to answer, but it is not this that delays his response. He swallows and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and then wipes his hands on his leggings and rests his fists on the table, and still he has not answered.

Liliana Vess is dead. Dead, at the hands of some random planeswalker. A _mercy_ kill, the way Beleren described it. Contracts broken, Vess had aged rapidly, becoming decrepit and mad, and fallen to a passerby’s dagger. Maybe there was something poetic in that, but the only poems Garruk knows are the ones his father taught him, mnemonics to remember farming lore. Vess’s death sits uneasily in his chest.

“Yeah,” he says anyway. “Found her, or close enough.”

“ _Her_?” Rowan asks with an exaggerated coquettish gasp.

“She’s dead,” Garruk snaps, harder than he intended. Rowan shrinks back and murmurs an apology.

“It’s fine,” he mutters. He picks up his meal, and tears meat from bone with his teeth. “It doesn’t matter.”

**ix.  
**It matters.

For the interminable time he was cursed, Garruk didn’t dream. He rarely even slept. The foul magic in his veins would not let him rest; he wandered aimlessly, roving through hallucinations that were the closest thing he could experience to dreams.

He’s dreaming now.

They aren’t nightmares. _Nightmare_ implies falling, scary beasts, dark figures, madmen chasing you. His dreams are just...faces. Faces, sitting in a circle around him, watching him placidly. Dead faces, alive only in his distorted memory.

 _What do you want?_ he asks in the sludge-slow manner of dreams.

They do not answer. They blink like animals at the question.

_I’m not sorry._

They don’t seem to care. They stare and blink, and Garruk cannot explain why this image perturbs him so upon waking.

**x.  
**The twins are never upset for long; Rowan’s moods are too mercurial to stay in any state for more than a half hour, and when she is happy Will is happy. Garruk’s outburst is forgiven without a word, and Garruk finds himself invited to watch some sort of sporting event.

“It’s _amazing,_ it’s just like the tournaments back home except _so much better,_ ” Rowan gushes. “We’ve already won two matches, if we win this one we get to advance to the quarterfinals _and_ we get this wicked trophy--”

He listens to the twins recount their matches. They have settled here quickly, adjusting to the strange reality of being a planeswalker.

There was a time, not long ago, when he had come damn close to killing them both. He doesn’t remember exactly why he had attacked them, but he supposes it must have been for the same reason he killed everyone else: they are planeswalkers.

That they hold no ill will towards him seems impossible, and yet they treat him like a friend.

**xi.  
**_Where is Liliana Vess?_ were the last words many planeswalkers heard.

Garruk didn’t ask everyone. It was a pointless question; Vess hardly made friends, and the only one who had ever even heard of her was Beleren. But he asked it sometimes anyway. It gave the killing a _purpose._ It elevated it from simple slaughter.

Beleren was the only one who’d ever given Garruk a useful answer, but many of the others had come up with interesting lies.

**xii.  
**The fighting in the stadium is sanitary, all flash and no blood. It is play fighting, carefully constructed so that no one is injured. Punches are pulled; spells fall deliberately short of their targets; blades are blunted and hollowed so they can’t even leave bruises.

There is little there for someone who has fought real battles. Bored, in his mind’s eye, Garruk completes each attack. Bones are shattered; blood sprays from gaping wounds; skin crackles under flame. Contestants die, screaming.

The images are easy to conjure. He’s been immersed in violence for so long that he does not need to wonder how a bone looks when it bursts through skin. How a person’s face purples and bruises when they are strangled. How it sounds when someone truly, earnestly begs for their life.

He is so engaged in his daydream that he doesn’t realize he’s imagined the sudden way Rowan’s body would go slack as her neck was snapped until her imaginary tongue lolls out of her dumbstruck mouth.

He waits for the twins in the atrium after that.

(“What’d you think?” Rowan asks, flushed with victory. “It’s great, isn’t it?”  
“You did well,” Garruk answers.)

**xiii.  
**He dreams of Vess too. In his dreams, she is stooped and twisted with age, and when he shoves her, she shatters to pieces upon the ground.

 _Witch,_ he growls, a wolf’s growl.

 _Beast,_ she hisses back, venomous.

 _You made me this,_ he accuses.

 _And you enjoyed every second,_ she says with a lover’s lilt.

He hits her. He hits her over and over and over until there’s nothing left of her skull but sand and her brain is a smear of oil on rock.

Her teeth are scattered and her jaw is in a dozen pieces and still she mocks. _Come now. Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy it._

The problem is: he does

**xiv.  
**“I want to go home,” he tells the twins. “I haven’t been back in...a long time.”

He hasn’t been back since--everything.

The twins are more enthusiastic than he expects.

“The semifinals aren’t for a week and a half, so we’ll have plenty of time,” Rowan says. “And really if you think about it, if there’s as many worlds as you say, then it’s just not right, us spending all our time on just one. We should explore.”

“I’d like to see where you come from. It’ll be interesting,” Will says.

Garruk doesn’t know what’s interesting about a farm, but he’s glad the twins are coming.

**xv.  
**Had it been a compulsion or an excuse?

**xvi.  
**His father’s bones are buried at the crossroads of the town. No one else’s are. They are scattered about, broken, chewed by animals, picked clean by insects. The buildings are burnt. Garruk doesn’t remember doing that--perhaps it was a lightning strike, after he’d left--but he remembers the rest.

“Wow. What happened here?” Will asks. He turns to Garruk with an expression that is likely supposed to be worry. Garruk sees it as accusatory.

It started with the sheriff. The sheriff, at least, deserved it, and his lackeys as well. The sheriff was a murderer. The sheriff killed Garruk's father.

It didn’t end with the sheriff.

“There was a monster,” Garruk says.

Could they have all deserved? Every one?

“What kind?” Rowan asks. “A troll? Ogres? A swarm of redcaps? An elf invasion? How’d you get away? You must have planeswalked, I bet.”

Garruk runs his hand across burnt wood and doesn’t answer. Charcoal turns his palm black. He remembers his hands, cursed, blackened and bloated like those of a drowned corpse, wrapped around his axe haft as he swung again and again and again and again and again and again….

But he hadn’t been cursed until much later.

**xvii.  
**He didn’t use to feel like this. He didn't use to feel at all, except for the burning in his veins.

**xviii.  
**It happens utterly by chance.

While he is comfortable in the woods, the twins are not, and so he walks with them westwards down the path until they come to a town. The twins make arrangements at the inn while Garruk mills about outside, nervous that someone will somehow recognize him after all these years. It’s a foolish worry. Everyone here who could have recognized him is dead.

He circles the inn. There’s a stable at the back, and he’s inhaling the almost-wild scent of it when he catches something else. Something almost familiar. A smell that doesn’t belong here, that doesn’t belong anywhere, because the one who bears it is supposed to be dead.

He follows it, leaving the twins behind.

**xix.  
**He regrets not asking, when he found Beleren, whether Beleren regrets getting so many people killed. He’ll have to remember to ask next time.

**xx.  
**He nearly doesn’t recognize her when he finds her at a tavern a handful of miles downriver from the town.

She isn’t wearing her usual risque black and purple. She’s dressed modestly in peasant’s garb, white and brown and green, and her hair is wrapped around her head in a milkmaid’s braid. Her back is to him; she sits alone at a table near a window, gazing out at the river. His eyes pass over her at first as merely some farm girl, and it is only by eliminating everyone else in the tavern that he realizes who she is.

She holds herself too still when he sits across from her.

“Liliana Vess,” he growls.

“I’m sorry,” she says demurely, and she is _nearly_ good enough to pull it off. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“Don’t play games,” he snarls, loud enough that the tavern’s other patrons take notice. “Let’s go outside where we won’t be disturbed.”

“Is he bothering you, Miss Iora?” the barkeep comes to the table, glancing nervously at Garruk. Garruk snorts; the man’s chivalry is admirable. If the barkeep and every other person in the tavern jumped him right now, they might-- _might_ \--have a chance at delaying him long enough for Vess to get away. Nothing more. They would all die for their trouble, of course.

“It’s fine, Enzo. A case of mistaken identity.”

At the last word, she throws her drink in Garruk’s face. The cup follows, bouncing off his forehead. He hears her chair clatter to the ground as he wipes wine from his eyes. Vess is out the door by the time he can see again, and the tavern’s patrons have made a hesitant wall between Garruk and the door.

Garruk pulls himself to his full height. When you’re a certain size, you no longer have to try to be intimidating.

“You leave her be, now,” the barkeep warns tremulously all the same.

“Get out of the way,” Garruk says flatly.

“Let’s all be calm,” another man says.

“No need for any unpleasantness,” says a third.

They do all die for their trouble.

Vess is gone by the time Garruk, gore-spattered, makes it outside, but her trail has not had time to fade, and he vanishes into the aether after her.

**xxi.**  
He didn’t use to care about guilt at all.

**xxii.  
**He finds her on a grey sand beach at the edge of a lake. Mountains rise sharply in the distance, dark against the bright moonlight. Piles of stones, the remnants of a bridge, dot the water. The water glows where the wind drives it ashore.

“You know, I’d forgotten about you entirely,” Vess says. “Don’t take that as an insult; things have been...strange, of late. They’d have to be, to make me forget an eight-foot talking ape.” Her voice thins and trails off as she speaks, as if she’s struggling to pay attention. She takes a step into reeds which are almost as tall as she is.

Garruk hadn’t realized how small she was. The strength of her magics and the delirium of the curse had caused her to grow in his memory until she stood eye-to-eye with him, until she loomed and towered and blotted out the sky. But she wields no magic now, and he sees with lucid eyes. She’s thinner than Rowan, only a handspan taller. His arm is thicker than her entire torso. No wonder he’d once confused a girl for this woman.

She stands with her back to him, looking out over the moonlit water.

“You cursed me,” he says, hefting his axe. For some reason, it is important to him that she understands her crimes.

“Yes,” she agrees.

“You turned my life into a waking nightmare. Into something unnatural. All the people I’ve killed: it’s your fault. Their blood is on your hands.” 

She laughs at that. It begins as a low chuckle, the restrained laugh of a cultured woman, but before long it changes, becomes high and gasping and uncontrolled. 

“Do you think I care? After all I’ve done?” She twists to look at him, lips curled just as they were when she cursed him. “Yes, I will carry your guilt for you, dear Garruk, if that makes you feel better.”

She twists back and wades further into the lake. “It makes no difference at all to me.”

The water glows where it touches her.

**xxiii.  
**If he was _made_ to do it, then it wasn’t his fault. It was her fault. It has _always_ been her fault.

It’s strange, the way he misses the curse burning in his veins.

**xxiv.  
**When his feet touch water, he jumps back as if scalded. There is something unnatural about the water; it is warm, too warm, like bathwater, and though only his feet are wet he can feel the water run under his helmet, through his hair, over his skull. It _scratches,_ each droplet burrowing like a tick.

He yanks his helmet off and scrubs and smacks at his scalp until the sensation fades.

“Careful of the water. Do you know where we are?” Vess asks. She has waded out, waist-deep.

Garruk scowls and jams his helmet back on. “Tricks won’t save you, witch. You have to come out eventually.”

“Thousands of people used to live around this lake. You can see, look, where the bridge was, and the lighthouse there. And then the water changed. You felt it, didn’t you? Even you have enough of a mind for them. Millions and millions of creatures too small to see, but hungry--for thoughts, for memories, or dreams. They’re everywhere, tiny little thought-eaters, but they’re only noticeable when they form swarms, and conditions have to be just right for that. You can resist them if you know how, but…” She splashes her hands in the water, causing ripples of pulsing light in the water. “The people here had no way of knowing how to do that. They came to see the glowing water and they left without a thought in their heads. Nowadays everyone avoids the area. But the thought-eaters can live a very, very long time between meals.”

She chuckles again. “If you really want your guilt gone, dunk your head. They’ll take it. They’ll take other things, too, but...wouldn’t it be worth it?”

Garruk settles himself on a flattish rock a safe distance from the water. “This ends one way.”

“I wonder, if I let them take me and stepped out a new woman, would you still kill her?” Vess asks.

“Yes,” he says without hesitation.

“Ah. For the best, then. There are things too precious to forget.”

**xxv.  
**_Destroy it all,_ the curse had whispered. _You know you want to._

And he did.

**xxvi.  
**“I won’t let you kill me,” Vess says. “This is your warning. Your only warning.” Quietly, to herself, she says: “Oh, if they could see me now: giving _warnings_ like a Boros recruit.”

“The world will be better off with you dead,” he says.

“You know, I hear that a lot,” she replies. “Usually, though, it comes from people who actually _care_ about the world. _I’m_ not saying the world would be better off with _you_ dead, though it’s doubtless true.”

She’s still in the water, waist-deep. He considers braving the water again, but decides against it. He can be patient...though he wishes she would stop talking.

“We’re of a kind, you and I,” she muses. “The sort of people who understand that power is the only currency in life. It doesn’t matter how you get it--magics, knowledge, muscles, charisma--but it matters that you get it. Other people don’t understand. They construct elaborate rules to explain how and when and why you can act, as if niceties are some sort of salvation. They call us heartless, ruthless monsters. And maybe we are.”

“Shut up,” he says, tiring of her prattle.

“What? You’ll kill a woman, but not listen to her last words?” Vess glares at him over her shoulder.

“Usually I kill them before they can say anything,” he says.

“You’ve been missing out. They say there’s truth in wine, but where truth really lies is in death. You can’t lie, not even to yourself, when death threatens.”

“What good is the truth to me?”

“Truth is its own sort of power. A weaker one, to be sure. Not the sort of thing you want to rely on. But it has its place.”

She’s quiet then, for a time. Garruk sits motionless. He can wait. He can wait forever.

**xxvii.  
**The curse had granted him freedom. A complete lack of inhibition. Animal-like, he had existed moment-to-moment, acting without being beholden to the myriad worries and concerns that clutter up sapient minds. The past had not existed. He’d been unable to conceive of a future. It had been simple. Impulse replaced thought.

He’s free of the curse. What now is he left with?

**xxviii.  
**He doesn’t expect the twins to show up. They’ve only planeswalked twice before; they don’t have the experience to figure out how to see through the wildness of the Blind Eternities into the patterns that other planeswalkers leave.

And yet they arrive, following his trail.

“Garruk!” Rowan exclaims as she appears. “What’d you go running off for?”

He snaps to his feet and grabs his axe. “Get back! Now!”

“What? Why? What is it?” the twins stammer, looking around for some enemies, mana swirling in their palms.

But they are not fighters. Not really. The arena is perfect for them: it is safe, contained, with rules and referees. They don’t know how to fight, not the way he and Vess fight.

“Friends of yours?” Vess calls idly.

He can hear the threat in her voice.

“They’re not part of this,” he growls, placing himself between the twins and her. He can shrug off her magics, especially after bearing the curse for so long. They cannot.

“Who’s that?” Will asks.

“Someone dangerous. Go back to the inn,” he orders.

“We can help you!” Rowan insists, coming to stand beside him, and Garruk has to restrain the urge to smack her. He settles instead on shoving her back with the butt of his axe.

“ _Go,_ ” he orders.

**xxix.  
**Once, when travelling, he came across an animal in a cage. He doesn’t remember what plane it was or what sort of creature. Something large, something with sharp teeth. Its captors had likely intended to use it for sport. Perhaps its capture had been serendipitous; the cage seemed intended for a far smaller creature. The beast could not lay down, but neither could it stand, and so it was stuck in a painful half-crouch.

He’d torn the door off without a thought and continued on to his quarry. The animal would not move, not when Garruk was there; even the largest predators sensed his corruption and cowered before him.

But he had been surprised when, on the next day, he returned down the same path and passed the cage and found the beast still inside.

**xxx.  
**The problem with mages like Vess is that they can begin their attack before you even realize it’s coming. There is no warning flash of fire or light, no warcry as they run to close the distance, no ominous creaking of trees or rock.

There is only Will, clutching at his chest and gasping.

“Take him and go!” Garruk yells. He’s not sure if the bond the twins share means Rowan can forcibly pull her brother out of danger, but he needs her to try.

She doesn’t listen. She yells and conjures sparks in her hands and runs towards the waterline to hurl them at Vess. Before she’s halfway there, she cries out. Her legs twist under her and she falls, spell arcing off to the side. She lays, shivering.

“You’ll notice they’re not dead. I _am_ trying to be nicer. But that can change,” Vess says. She’s turned around fully, and darkness swirls around her. The glow in the water is gone. “You and I, Garruk, we can never stop being what we are. We can only hide it.”

He’s stuck at the water’s edge. “Come and face me!”

“No. If I’ve done my spell right, these two won’t be up to traveling for about a day. I’m sure you’ve noticed how it’s getting colder. Nights are long here, and a person can die without a fire. There could be wild animals out here too. They’ll need someone to tend them. And by the time they’re up, I’ll be long gone.”

Frustrated, he slashes the water with his axe. The droplets itch where they touch his skin.

“As I said, I’m trying to be nicer. But if you follow me, I will kill you. If they come with you, I will kill them and _then_ kill you. I will not submit to death, not yet, and definitely not at your hands. _Everything_ has been taken from me but my life, and I will not surrender that.” Her face twists under the moonlight, enraged, and her voice breaks into a snarl.

Darkness closes around her and she is gone.

**xxxi.  
**Irritated, he’d killed the beast.

**xxxii.  
**He carries the twins away from the lake to a small stand of trees where the ground is softer and builds a fire out of driftwood. They moan uncomfortably in the half-sleep of the sick, twisting and twitching in response to Vess’s spell. Rowan vomits and falls immediately back into unconsciousness. He cleans her mouth with a bit of moss.

The fire burns until daybreak.

(“We’ll be prepared next time,” Will insists.  
“She’s dangerous, she attacked us out of _nowhere,_ ” Rowan agrees.  
“No,” Garruk tells them. “It’s done.”)

**Author's Note:**

> Ten points to whoever finds all the Planechase references. I miss Planechase so much.


End file.
